Current telecommunications networks are capable of tracking and recording call transaction data, i.e., information associated with a given telephone call, and using this data to support call processing and to provide accurate billing information to customers. Systems have also been developed which strive to provide the customer with quite detailed call transaction data which the customer may use for specific purposes. U.S. Pat. No. 5,425,087 to Gerber, for example, discloses a system that reports the length of each call, the length of time that a party was placed on hold, and the telephone number of the other party to a system administrator so that the telephone activities of employees can be monitored in real time.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,754,634 to Kay, et al. discloses a system for tracking calls made to individual predetermined subscribers and automatically reporting information, including demographic breakdowns of calls, such as time of day, day of week, and location of origin, to the subscriber. The disclosed system makes use of the Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) and Integrated Service Control Point (ISCP) platform to provide such information to those subscribers desirous of such service. The ISCP captures the time and date of the call, the originating call number and the subscriber's call number. ISCP network data is collected for all calls placed to service subscribers by the AIN Data and Reports System (DRS). DRS is an operation support utility that provides service analysis on the collected data. The data may be sorted on the basis of called subscriber number and transmitted at periodic intervals to a report processor.
The call originating telephone number for each call may be used to access an existing telephone system billing database to obtain caller information, including zip code. The zip code, in turn, can be used to access a commercially available census database to provide further demographic information. For example, demographics for a given zip code may include median age and median income. Report statistics can match these demographics with a number of calls received as collected at the ISCP.
The calling party number may be supplied through Caller ID or AIN transmission. If this information is available only for calls within a telephone company Local Access and Transport Area (LATA), reports may include detailed breakdown of such calls while categorizing out of LATA calls in more general breakdowns. Detailed zip code results can include number and percentage of residential calls, business calls, homeowners, median income and age. Generalized information may include numbers, averages and percentages of calls in time ranges for days of the week.
The existing arrangements have some drawbacks. In the existing arrangements, a zip code cannot be attached to certain calls. For example, because a telephone company has no billing records for telephone numbers outside of its LATA, it cannot attach a zip code to long distance calls. Further, under the existing arrangement, there is no way to attach a geographical indicator to a call without a zip code. Thus, for many calls, no geographical indicator can be attached. Furthermore, even for calls for which a zip code is attached, there is no indication of an actual geographic location. All the subscriber receives is a zip code. Another drawback of the existing arrangements is that the report that is output to the subscriber is only available in tabular form, which tends to be rather cryptic. Thus, it is difficult and inconvenient for the subscriber to comprehend and absorb the information contained in the tables. Further still, the prior art does not facilitate convenient call record report delivery.
There is a need in the telecommunications industry for a system and method of providing accurate call records, and providing such records to service subscribers in a convenient manner. The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and provides additional advantages over the prior art.